and can see both versions appear side by side, one correct and the other incorrect while I would expect identical behaviour from both cases

Can someone explain me what is going wrong here? The old version of the repository is available here Slightly different than this example as I tried to simplify the code and doesn’t have the menu.main.html.

There was no issues with partials or the hrefs. I simply forgot to quote when I did <a href = {{.}}> instead of <a href = "{{.}}"> I am still a novice so I am not sure what this changes but problem is solved